Google from 2020 will also offer bank current accounts

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NEW YORK – Perhaps to get out of the mess after the revelations about Project Nigthingale and health data "stolen" from 50 million Americans who are now turning on a lighthouse by federal authorities, Google has just announced that it will offer soon, starting next year, its users the possibility of opening current accounts. Real current accounts for savers, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, thanks to a partnership between Alphabet, Citigroup and a small lender linked to Stanford University. The project of the Big G current accounts will be called «Cache».

Caesar Sengupta, Google executive chairing the payments division said in an interview that "our approach will be to work side by side with the banks and the financial system ". Not a bank in its own right, a fintech on Alibaba's AliPay that has undermined the certainties of the traditional Chinese banking system, but a credit service offered by the most popular global search engine linked however to the banking sector. "It will be a long way to go, but more sustainable," explained the Google manager.

Google is in good company. All the big techs are approaching the financial world to reap the benefits of their big data "treasure" that allows them to understand consumer behavior. Apple has recently introduced a credit card, in collaboration with Goldman Sachs. Amazon is studying how Google, along with a number of banks, can offer current accounts to its customers. Facebook, among a thousand perplexities and retreats before leaving, is trying to launch Libra, its digital currency.

The ambitions of big tech clash with the reluctance of the credit industry that fears to lose the primacy of the market as well as customers, but also with fears of regulators, of the central banks and the authorities of the markets, scared by a far west digital monetary without rules and without controls.

Current accounts are considered as a commodity, a product to which savers are tied, with a high retention rate over time and a low propensity to change. However, bank accounts carry a whole series of high-yielding services, such as investments and bank loans. Contain one mine of information for big tech, starting from the average balance of a given account by age and by category, the bills that are paid each month, how the money is spent by the account holders. The federal regulators have put the use that Google and others make of personal data from several points of view under review. The last story concerns the health data of the 50 million Americans used without consent, but Big G is also under review use of your smart speaker data like Alexa, apps like Google Map that track people's movements and their powerful e-mail service.